Red Card
Hello and welcome to a new week of
reviews here on
Pojo’s CotD.
We kick things off with a card I
completely and utterly detest.
Red Card has a pretty simple effect: it
forces your opponent to shuffle their
hand into their deck and draw four
cards. It’s kind of like a one-sided
Judge, but the catch is that, unlike
Judge, it is an Item card and not a
Supporter.
So, why do I hate it so much? It’s not
because I think it’s ‘broken’, or even
especially good. There isn’t much
support in the format for the kind of
hand disruption deck that would make it
a very powerful card. Nope, the reason I
think this card is bad for the game is
that it offers luck-based disruption at
virtually no cost (other than taking up
deck space). Red Card doesn’t use up a
Supporter slot, and isn’t balanced out
by a coin flip either (like Hooligans
Jim & Cas or
the older Cyrus’s Initiative). The
effect could be negligible, or it could
be utterly devastating, but either way
it takes no real skill to use.
And that’s the problem, really. Having a
good hand wrecked by something as cheap
as Red Card is no fun and it’s not as if
an opponent has to play well, or build
their deck carefully to achieve that:
they can simply put you in a bad
position by getting lucky. It’s a card
that just creates more variance within
the game, and that’s a road the
designers have travelled down too far as
it is.
Rating
Modified: 3 (good for you if it works,
but as far as a healthy game is
concerned, it’s the worst card we have
had since N)
Limited: 2 (to be honest, your opponent
will likely appreciate the hand refresh
most of the time)
